Sunday of the Thirtieth Week of the Year, C - October 24, 2004

    The Sunday readings these past few weeks have been, in one degree or another, about prayer. And in today’s Gospel we see that one of the essential ingredients of prayer is humility. Our Lord comments on the self-righteous Pharisee and the man who before God in prayer acknowledges his sinfulness, and He says, “For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled while he who humbles himself shall be exalted.”
    But immediately we have to dispel from our thoughts those notions of humility that are false to the true nature of this virtue, all those notions of humble-pie and fearfulness and mousiness. For humility, after all, is a virtue. The idea of virtue is fascinating. The word itself is intriguing. It comes, ultimately, to us from the Latin word vir, which means simply “man,” a male. Thus virtue carries the meaning of manliness or power, but not just any old power, certainly not the modern idea of power of using knowledge to dominate everything and everybody. But rather, it means a human power, or better, a humanizing power, the potency to be all that it means to be human, to be noble, to be of excellent character. It carries the meaning, then, of being free from low desires and motives. The life of virtue leads to the idea of nobility ruling in the heart of a man or woman and setting them free to pursue excellence.
    And where is this freedom that comes to us from the virtue of humility? What a freedom it is not to have to keep up pretenses! What a freedom it is to let go of the facade, to let it dissipate in the light of healthful doses of reality! What a liberation it is to realize that when our Lord said, “Blessed are the poor,” He meant all of us, you and me. How much easier, then, prayer becomes when it is not an occasion of self-defense, of insistence before God that, “Surely, Lord you see that I am a good person!” No, prayer of the humble is the prayer of someone living in the real world, the world of light, revealing light. There, in the midst of prayer, we stop the game of hiding from ourselves, from our inmost thoughts. How freeing it is to step out into the searching look of God and let Him show us both our real selves and also that to which He is calling us.
    Humility is the virtue, the power of realization, that we live and move in the very presence of God, that there is not a single thought, attitude, or action that is not known to God intimately and fully. Humility reminds us of the sobering truth that we are fully accountable to this God, that we are creature, and He is Creator; that we really are poor in and of ourselves, poor and needy, and He is the source of all life; that we are sinners, and God is the source of all forgiveness and holiness.
    Humility, especially in prayer, teaches us the utter futility of the protest, “Well, I am just as good as the next guy.” For the “next guy” is not the standard, the opinion polls in this country (which    reveal more about the confusion of Americans than anything else) are not what we measure up to. Jesus said, our Lord commanded, “Be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” There’s the standard. And humility sets us off on the right start by telling us immediately, “Hey, I’m not there yet.” But not only does it show us our lack, humility also makes it possible for us to see the way, or better, the One who is the origin of all perfection.
    How? Because humility breaks through the blindness of pride. No sin is more dangerous than pride, because nothing is more blinding; nothing cuts one off from reality as pride does -- pride, that false sense of self-sufficiency, self-defense, and really just plain ole self-obsession: obsession with one’s looks, with fashion, with what others may think of one, with comfort, with that now epidemic craving for constant and senseless affirmation. Humility liberates us from all of that, that which can be no better described than darkness and prison, because it -- pride -- shuts us up in ourselves, where we build up those walls of protection, those facades of self-sufficiency, a pathetic little closet lined with mirrors. But let’s face it. Let’s be candid. Let’s be, in other words, humble, and face reality: this is what humility would teach us -- that we are poor, we are fragile and yet that we are made for something, the nobility and dignity of which is beyond human words to describe. Poverty of spirit coupled with a high and holy calling. Only in the light of humility will we really see that.
    And this shouldn’t surprise us. For when God Himself came to dwell among us as a Man, the man Jesus, He described Himself as meek and lowly and humble of heart. Here then is one of the greatest motivations to humility and to abandon the futility of pride: that God Himself is humble. This is expressed beautifully in the Mass, when the priest prepares the chalice, saying a prayer that you normally don’t hear: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.” There it is again, the same principle as in today’s Gospel: “Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled while he who humbles himself shall be exalted.” Have we then any excuse to remain in the prison of pride, when our Lord humbled himself that we might, through joining Him in this power of humility, be also exalted with Him? Should not the humility of Jesus, the Son of God, vanquish our pride?
    And so we are called to humility, and in being called to that, we are also invited to freedom. For humility is the virtue of light, of reality. With it, we see ourselves in our need of God, and so are able to see the hand of God offered to us for our help. Humility, far from being a self-inflicted put-down, is rather, a letting go of the heavy burden of pride so that we might rise to the heights of God’s goodness and glory. “Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled while he who humbles himself shall be exalted.”